- Slashdot for scientific articles, ideas
- Online lab notebooks
- Lab "feed": An equivalent of an RSS feed of what is coming out of a lab updated daily/weekly. Results would be less finalized but might help people coordinate on projects accross labs rather than just repeating each other's work in secret.
- Immediate data sharing: Currently authors must keep data private until a paper is published. Regardless of whether the publishing process can be accelerated, it would be desirable if the raw data could be shared earlier while protecting the authors rights to publish papers based on the data. This idea is related to some of the suggestion/problems above.
- Scientific "currency" outside of authorship on paper: I think this might enable better data sharing among other things. I.e. if you use my data you need to give me X credits (where the value of X credits to my career is less than authorship on paper but greater than nothing.) I have no idea what such a system would look like.
- Collaborative written works: Currently review articles written by experts in the field are the primary mechanism in which the state of a research area is evaluated. Instead, one could imagine using collaborative writing tools like wiki's to maintain a real-time synopsis of a field.

Why do I blog this? I am interested in how web2.0 tech could reshape science (research!) practices.